Trying to Do Our Part

ALAN ALLNUTT, The Gazette04.20.2007

Tour of the Masson Pulp Mill in Gatineau Quebec. Thursday April 05 2007. It takes 25,000 of these chips to make up one 600 kilo roll of paper .The mill supplies newsprint to many North American newspapers including the Gazette.Gordon Beck
/ Gordon Beck

Gazette pages on the press at our plant on St. Jacques St. W.Gordon Beck, The Gazette
/ The Gazette

The Gazette is a complex business. Every day, we conduct several distinct types of operations. We own and operate a manufacturing plant, where we're in the printing business. We rent space in the Dominion Square building, where we're in the business of gathering news, selling advertising and subscriptions, putting content online and doing all the office functions to support the others. We have our paper product delivered through contracts with independent distributors.

And we're in the business of challenging people. We regularly challenge governments, companies, institutions and individuals to do better in whatever aspect of society they're involved in.

Lately, the challenge to do better has had more and more to do with the environment and sustainable development. It's among the top items on everyone's list of concerns.

At The Gazette, we've reported on studies, looked at other companies' practices, given consumer tips, urged action. But rather than just point fingers at everyone else, today we're taking a hard look at our newspaper. How "green" are we? How green can we be?

This will be a continuing process for us. Already, we have found that we - and the whole newspaper industry - have come a long way over the past couple of decades. A share of the newsprint The Gazette uses is made of recycled paper and the rest is made from wood chips that are a byproduct of the lumber industry - the trees are not cut down solely to be ground into pulp. The mills that produce our newsprint are state-of-the-art. Our own printing plant, which we opened in Notre Dame de Grace five years ago, is continually making environmental improvements, from using vegetable-based inks to steadily decreasing energy use.

Our product, the daily newspaper, is recycled in growing amounts in Montreal.

Still, further improvements in all these areas are inevitable. Increasing use of online versions of newspapers, like the digital Gazette, will help.

There are other parts of our operation where we don't do nearly as well as we'd like. We're an information business, and it's clear in our offices that the dream of a paperless society has not come true. We have recycling bins everywhere, but we shouldn't be using all the paper that ends up in them. As of this week, company policy will require everyone to do double-sided printing and copying whenever and wherever possible.

The delivery of the paper is heavily dependent on vehicles, and while it will be harder to find a solution to that, we know that education of our distributors and carriers will be a good first step.

We are, after all, in the same boat as everyone else: We have to balance our desire to do better on the environmental front with our need to prosper as a business - providing a vital service to our readers, as well as jobs for our employees. We do believe, however, that becoming a greener, more environmentally sustainable operation will be good both for society and for business.

We've taken the first big step - looking at ourselves and getting a good idea of our ecological footprint. In the coming months, we'll be combing through our findings, looking deeper into some areas, and figuring out where we can best put our next efforts.